The game - which was originally supposed to launch in 1995 - was considered lost by many fans, despite the existence of unfinished ROMs online. However, this September we'll finally get the chance to play the mastered and complete version of the game, and the timing has led some to speculate that Nintendo was waiting for the patent to expire on the Super FX chip - designed by defunct UK firm Argonaut - before releasing the title.

However, we've spoken exclusively to Argonaut founder Jez San - the man who dreamt up the concept of the Super FX chip - and he's poured cold water on that idea:

So there you have it, direct from the horse's mouth. Nintendo always owned the patent to the Super FX chip because it paid for its production and presumably retained all rights, despite Argonaut's involvement. Perhaps it's like San says; Nintendo felt it was time to release the game and the creation of the Super NES Classic gave it the perfect excuse.

Damien has over a decade of professional writing experience under his belt, as well as a repulsively hairy belly. Rumours that he turned down a role in The Hobbit to work on Nintendo Life are, to the best of our knowledge, completely and utterly unfounded.

News? More like olds, this has been known for a while. Nintendo just has a lot of difficulty with emulation for some reason, to the point they couldn't get Super FX games (except Yoshi's Island SNES, although that's Super FX2; Edit: woops never mind, I forgot they didn't, I just have it on my Wii ) working on one until now. (Even though soft modding a Wii and playing SF 1 or 2, or Stunt Race FX, proves that there's no technical barrier.). The patent difficulty argument has always been bunk on the Super FX titles being missing from VC.

Star Fox 2 ROM's available online are basically entirely complete at this point. Also, they can play at 60 FPS, way smoother than it would be on original hardware. It remains to be seen how well the SNES Mini variant will perform.

It would be cool if they added options for the framerate. That would require some big changes though. There are overclocked Super FX Chip Star Fox videos online and the game's logic runs faster too. That is to say, the original game was not made to run with respect to time but directly based on the speed of the processor itself.

@Slim1999 The game was built for the hardware, if you overclock it to 60 it runs faster than intended and becomes a harder game as a result, because they designed it to be fun and actually manageable at the hardware level.

Star Fox Overclocked is fun, but by no means the way to play it, because the SNES couldn't handle it that well.

@BLP_Software Yeah, most prefer locking in at 30 FPS for the intended design and difficulty. (The original hardware dipped below 30 FPS with more significant enemies onscreen, so there is merit to emulating it.) But 60 FPS is an interesting challenge, actually gives a sense of speed to those Arwings.

And in another ten years it will probably feel it's time to release the English translation of Mother 3.

I think it included Star Fox here because it meant it could reduce the number of games by 33%--while increasing the price 33% at the same time--and replace them with one game that it knows many people will perceive to be worth just as much as ten other games because of its rarity and almost mythical status (not me personally, but a bunch of people).

@PlywoodStickIf they couldn't emulate the SuperFX chip then they couldn't emulate the second SuperFX chip either as that was only a bumped up original SuperFX chip. Yoshi's Island (the original SNES release) has never been released on the virtual console. The title released was the Gameboy Advance version.

I desperately WANT to play this game, and I rather like that you have to beat the first level of the 1st Starfox to unlock it. Now if only I could find a North American SNES Classic Edition to pre-order. I do have one of the European ones pre-ordered for import but if I can find one locally, that would be ideal. Also for nostalgia purposes, I would like the North American system and box.

@gameguy73 Oh... I've taken my SNES Yoshi's Island copy for granted for too long, I thought they did that one... It's such a huge omission. Personally, I couldn't stand the GBA version's sound effects... Couldn't bring myself to get through it.

I'm not totally buying the patent issue is debunked. Nintendo had the means to emulate FX for some time but chose not to. As for Star Fox 2, Bravo. I have heard rumors that the internal development ROM was vastly different to the leaked found prototypes.

@impurekind Didn't know about that, I couldn't get through the first world. There's only so much "Hup!" "HMMMMMMMMM!!!" "Breeharo!" "AAAAAH WOWOWOWOWO" "WAAAH WAAAAAH WAAAAH" I could take before I wanted to grab a sledge hammer and smash the 3DS to pieces... Mute Yoshi is best Yoshi.

@PlywoodStick Oh, yeah . . . that's also sh*t they added to the GBA version that was much subtler and better in the original. They kind of had a bad habit of adding in loads of annoying voices and sounds to all the older Mario games when they put them on GBA. God knows which idiot thought this improved those games--it really didn't.

the versions online are basically complete? I don't think that's strictly true as I read in the interview with one of the starfox devs that said the leaked versions online were missing the fine tuning and were in debug mode so the version that will get released im sure is going to be different from the leaked version

@PlywoodStick The games work, and are playable, but a game like Stunt Racer FX is not running flawlessly at all on a Wii SNES emulator, and not at the right speed/frame rate either. And even on a PC SNES emulator, the result is more or less the same, so something is up with those Super FX chip games that makes it difficult to emulate correctly.

And the Star Fox ROMs available online are definitely NOT complete. They're all betas, since the completed master never left Nintendo's vaults. Those betas have several issues, such as one version simply freezing at a certain level, and others that were modified by hackers have all kinds of glitches and bugs that don't make them a joy to play at ALL.

And as Dylan Cuthbert has said:
"All those ROMs lacked the final magic - i.e. the Mario Club QA and tuning process that makes Nintendo games so good. The final few months of iteration are so important for a game. Also they were set up in debug modes, so the encounter systems didn't seem to work very well."

I never believed that when I originally heard it. I couldn't believe that Nintendo would have not covered their bases concerning their games when they are usually so careful. Especially when we got Donkey 64 on VC finally. And it was developed wholly by Rare, whereas Star Fox 2 was developed between Argonaut and Nintendo.

Of course, Nintendo wasn't very careful when they let Rare get picked up by Microsoft. I'll never understand that one!

@impurekind Those do, Stunt Racer does not. I should have elaborated that emulators don't have issues with ALL of them. And who knows how difficult Star Fox 2 would be? It is running on Super FX 2, just like Yoshi's Island, but the game itself is considerably more demanding, for starters due to the improved 3D over the original Star Fox.

Even if Nintendo didn't always own the rights to this co-processor, like I've explained on here for the umpteenth time, patent rights long ago became meaningless. They're very much unlike copyrights and expired years ago.

The Super FX is in the public domain today and has been for several years now, which is why for one example that Hyperkin is able to get away with emulating it on their Retron 5 with no fear of Nintendo taking legal action.

@singingbrakeman Trademark has nothing to do with this. That's what protects something like a logo. This chip design was protected by patents and they have a built-in expiration date that hasn't been messed up too much yet by big business, unlike copyrights that are for all intents and purposes, indefinite now.

@FTL Homebrew guys tend to go the extra mile to get stuff like this working on emulators and the like.

I mean, just consider the effort the homebrew fans put into the utterly stellar English translation of Mother 3 so English speaking people could finally play that game in the west (without having to learn Japanese). . . .

I'm guessing they never released it because it's probably not that great, but it makes sense now as an exclusive for the SNES mini to entice people into buying it who've already bought the other titles several times over.

Ignoring basic patent law, another thing that should've had people thinking over this online theory to explain the absence of Super FX games, is the date when Argonaut went under.

It entered receivership in October 2004 at a time when Nintendo likely was already in the preliminary stages of what became known as the Wii Virtual Console, and their assets were auctioned off in 2006.

Anything that Nintendo didn't have that they needed to control in order to be able to rerelease some iconic 1st party SNES classics, could've been picked up then for a song.

There was never any logic in this theory. People should've thought it over a little. Instead, they pulled an Earthbound and bought into it hook, line, and sinker.

@SLIGEACH_EIREIt's 2017, a time when retro enthusiasm is at an all time high. People are buying clone consoles and plug n' play devices, as well as newly produced games for old systems, including the SNES. The retro market is a lucrative one right now.

That's not to mention we're hot off the heels of the NES Classic Edition, a success hindered (greatly) only by Nintendo's ability and decisions to produce enough supply to meet demand. (And expiring distribution licenses on games, as some have pointed out.)

@RyanSilberman
It's really more to do with the fact that Nintendo wasn't happy with the emulation of it on VC. Yes, some people have made StarFox work on the Wii through SNES9xGX and the like, but it's not 100% accurate by any means. Nintendo had high standards for the service.

@FTL In it's original form, yes. It was unfinished. However, the kinks have been worked out of the currently available product, nothing vital is missing. It probably won't have much to visibly distinguish it from the official version, except maybe frame rate...

@PlywoodStick If you're referring to the illegally available Star Fox 2 ROMs, then it's definitely a big, fat NO. The kinks have not been worked out at all. And I've tried three different versions. All are betas, have not been completely tested by any official means, and have been tampered with by hackers, making them instantly inferior to the original product.

Only translation hacks qualify as beneficial, but tampering with the game itself obviously not.

now they just need to add it to the Wii U VC for all of us who couldn't order a SNES Mini because it sold out as soon as it came up for order (and most by eBay scalpers it seems judging by the numbers of systems up for sale on there are OVERLY bloated prices)

@impurekind I'm absolutely with you on the GBA Mario games and the added voices. I found those additions quite unappealing and avoided those games for a while. I eventually picked them up used because they're great games anyway. To this day, I believe less is more when it comes to putting voices in games. I hate when games get too chatty during gameplay.

One reason people believed there were legal issues is because Dylan Cuthbert said there probably were legal issues and they were probably a nightmare. He could have been guessing and he definitely could have been mistaken as we don't know how much he knew about those things.

@PlywoodStickDylan Cuthbert has said that any of the prototypes around the web are still lacking some features. He mentioned there were some rogue-like elements that make each playthrough different. I wouldn't be surprised if the music, graphics and more weren't completely finalized in that build either.

@SmaMan Snes9x GX isn't really tuned to the Wii at all, it's not a fair comparison to what a Nintendo-made emu can do. And this goes without saying but Wii U has a lot more power to waste yet it didn't see any SFX emulation either.

My take on why they waited so long to release the game... I would have to guess that they simply forgot that it even existed, then somebody remembered it as they were deciding on what games to add to this mini system (presumably after thinking of the first Star Fox game). So less of an issue of hardware or emulations, rather them not remembering/caring to do it.

@SmaMan@ThanosReXXX Oh, wow. Well, goes to show how much I know. I knew it was a beta, but I didn't know that there was intended to be anything more than what's already there, such as rogue like elements. I can see how those would fit in, it's faster paced than your average Star Fox game. I've seen several play throughs that didn't encounter major issues, and I haven't tried the current version yet, but I will do that tonight.

Also, it seems the SNES Mini is that much more valuable, if there's additional content.

@sdelfin Well, it all depends on the type of games and the production value for me personally, regarding whether I want more or less voice work. For an epic RPG like Legend of Zelda for example, I now expect to hear full high quality voice work for every character in the game--but not necessarily Link just because of how he is the player and the player is he--and for all the dialogue in the game. But, for these GBA versions of the classic Mario games, it really was just ill-advised to shovel in a bunch of random oohs and aahs--every single time they jump or perform even the most menial action--and think that wasn't going to be annoying as hell.

@PlywoodStick@impurekind Reading the programmers interview, he said that those versions lacked various gameplay design elements (not visually but gameplay).. not related to 'errors or kinks'. I understand the roms are working amd might 'look' the same, but that has nothing to do with if things were changed / added as he says.